


Operation Red Nose

by Miss_M



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Birthday Party, Clowns, F/M, Gen, Humor, Undercover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 01:33:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7146749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brienne goes on a mission. Jaime provides expert advice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Operation Red Nose

**Author's Note:**

> This could not _not_ be crack. I first conceived of this story as a crack AU of Lady_in_Red’s spy ‘verse, but it quickly took on a loopy life of its own. I own nothing.

“Put your nose on, Brienne.”

Brienne clenched her jaw. Even tinny and distant as he sounded through her earpiece, Jaime was having entirely too much fun at her expense. 

Brienne resolutely did not touch the pocket of her baggy yellow jumpsuit with the large purple polka dots. She moved the bouquet of sausage-shaped balloons from her right hand to her left and pressed the buzzer, leaving her right hand free in case she was recognized and had to karate chop someone at once. The jumpsuit did not afford many places to hide a weapon, Brienne’s lime-green shoes were very long but not tall enough to conceal a dagger, and her poufy, rainbow-colored wig barely hid the tiny camera which was Jaime and Podrick’s eyes during the mission. 

Jaime sighed in Brienne’s ear, loud with static. “Brienne, I can tell you haven’t put it on. Do you _want_ Baelish to recognize you? Granted, you might be able to take him and his security out, but M’lady Stark insisted on discretion…”

“All right!” Brienne growled, snatched the ridiculous red clown nose from her pocket, and stuck it on her own nose. 

“We can’t very well call this Operation Red Nose if you don’t put it on…”

“I’ve put it on! Stop talking. We’re not calling it that.” 

“I am.”

Brienne was all set to insist otherwise when a gruff male voice came on the intercom and demanded to know her business. Jaime had the good grace to keep quiet while Brienne informed the security in Petyr Baelish’s country villa that Moffo the Clown had arrived for little Robin’s birthday party. She brandished the balloons at the security camera for good measure. 

The gate had not finished opening to admit her before Jaime resumed talking, his voice pleasantly rambling where a moment ago it had sounded didactic. (Worried. Brienne knew he worried about her, ever since his injury prevented him from accompanying her on jobs. This made his intrusive voice in her ear only slightly less annoying.) 

“Just remember to keep smiling. You look nice when you smile, even if you currently resemble the love child of a drag queen and an escaped mental patient…”

Podrick snickered from his seat beside Jaime, at the portable surveillance console in their nondescript, dark-windowed van parked behind Baelish’s estate. 

“I will get you for this,” Brienne muttered as she stomped up the garden path to the villa’s front door in her oversized shoes, trailing balloons. “You will both pay.” 

“I could hardly make balloon animals with one hand, and Podrick’s juggling skills need some work, don’t they, lad?”

“Yes, sir. S… some work.” 

“See, Brienne? You were the logical candidate for this job.”

Brienne exhaled loudly, then she was through the front door and putting on a bright, fake smile for the thin, agitated woman with russet hair who greeted her. The resemblance to their employer was striking.

Lysa Arryn-Baelish, born Tully, frowned up at Brienne. 

“You’re awfully big,” Mrs. Baelish said, wringing her beringed hands nervously. “Are you sure you will be gentle with the children? I don’t want them getting scared.” 

She led the way into the open-plan den, while Brienne made soothing noises. Passing the floor-to-ceiling mirror in the foyer, Brienne caught a glimpse of herself: dressed as she was, half obscured by balloons, and wearing what felt like at least a pound of garish makeup, she did look more menacing than amusing. Not to mention ludicrous. 

She squeezed her lips, but the bright red smile painted across her mouth and cheeks remained in place. 

“You look great, Brienne,” Jaime murmured, startling her for a moment. “No one will see through that disguise. Break a leg.” 

Brienne nodded at the mirror for the benefit of the camera in her wig, before she hurried after Mrs. Baelish. 

The den in Baelish’s villa resembled a cube of glass and dark paneling. The sparse furniture was minimalist in its elegance, the carpet was white, the artwork monochromatic and abstract. The room looked like a set-up for a magazine shoot, a pristine camouflage, rather than a living space. A marble fireplace held the only splash of color in the room: an assortment of knickknacks on the mantel. One wall was taken up by sliding glass doors overlooking a huge lawn bound by a tall garden wall. 

Walking down the three steps to den level, Brienne pretended to stumble and executed an exaggerated corkscrew twirl, windmilling her arms and flailing with the balloons, allowing Jaime and Podrick a decent look at the whole room. 

“Mantelpiece,” they said in unison. 

Brienne hid an eye-roll behind an exaggerated routine of steadying herself in the middle of the floor, adjusting her wig and fighting the balloons into order, while the eight young children assembled on the child-unfriendly white carpet howled with laughter. 

“That was funny, Mama,” the pale child Brienne guessed was the birthday boy screeched, clapping his small hands. “Make him do it again. I want to see the clown fly again.”

Lysa Baelish must not have noticed Brienne wasn’t a man or she did not consider that a point worth correcting her son on. Brienne did not disabuse anyone of the notion. The longer she could keep up the charade as Moffo, the better. 

“Maybe later, darling,” Mrs. Baelish said, looking distracted. She kept darting looks down a corridor off the den, leading to what Brienne knew from research was Petyr Baelish’s office and the bedrooms. “Boffo the Clown is here to show you all some tricks. Won’t that be fun?” 

“It’s _Moffo_ the Clown, not Boffo,” Jaime aped Brienne’s unamused tone. “There is a huge difference between the two. Huge. Astronomical.”

Brienne gritted her teeth, put the oval weight to which the balloons’ strings were tied down on the floor, and proceeded to pull a chain of knotted, colorful handkerchiefs out of her sleeve. She figured she would start with something relatively easy. There had not been a lot of time for her to learn many tricks, as Catelyn Stark had been most insistent that she wanted the incriminating item back at once. 

The handkerchiefs were not going to cut it. Almost as soon as Brienne started, little Robin Arryn piped up again in his shrill voice. 

“I saw a wizard do that at the Highgarden fair last month. That’s not fun! I want fun! Do something fun or my Uncle Petyr will make you be sorry.” 

_A magician_ , Brienne thought. _You saw a magician, not a wizard, you spoiled child. There is a huge difference…_ Catching the drift of her thoughts, she bit her lip, swearing dire vengeance on Jaime, who could not seem to understand that keeping up a running commentary in her ear while she was on missions was more distracting than comforting. Brienne knew being confined to handler duties irked him, but annoying her during missions didn’t help. 

The other children took up Robin Arryn’s battle cry and started shrilling for something fun. In Brienne’s earpiece, Jaime swore and told Podrick something, the words drowned out by the children’s unholy racket. 

A fire alarm went off in the kitchen. Brienne sent silent thanks to Pod’s successful hacking of Baelish’s security system. 

Lysa’s expression turned even more pinched than usual. Brienne hastily produced a handful of bright rubber balls from her pocket, showed them to the harried woman with what she hoped was a reassuring smile. 

“I will be right back,” Mrs. Baelish said with relief, already hurrying toward the kitchen. “That alarm has been going off all day…”

Perhaps Podrick’s hacking of the security system hadn’t been all that smooth. What else might have they done less well than usual, when they weren’t being pressured by an angry Mrs. Stark? 

Brienne attempted to juggle three of the balls, but guns were more her forte and she’d only had an hour to practice juggling that afternoon. Almost at once one ball fell on the floor, bounced almost as high as Brienne’s red nose, and went bouncing across the room toward the glass doors in ever diminishing arcs. The children set up an unhappy racket again. Brienne tried to do better with the remaining two balls, but fumbled one almost at once. 

Down the corridor, a door opened and an irritated male voice called out: “Lysa, what is wrong with that thrice-damned smoke detector? Should I send Harrold to look at it? And where is that clown we hired, I can’t hear myself think over the sound of Robin’s friends staging a minor revolution in the den?”

Brienne heard the clatter of Mrs. Baelish’s heels on the hardwood floor as she flitted from the kitchen, the fire alarm still blaring, to confer with her husband. 

Brienne dropped the last ball on the floor and made for the fireplace. She might as well see if the item she’d come for was where their intelligence suggested it would be, pocket it, and escape before one of the adults returned to the den. 

A sudden weight wrapped itself around Brienne’s leg, hobbling her. 

“If you don’t do something fun _right now_ , I’m calling Uncle Petyr.” Robin Arryn scowled up at Brienne.

Brienne considered tying a balloon animal, but with her luck she’d pop the first one by accident. Podrick had filled the balloons with knockout gas. Brienne had taken the antidote pill, of course, but she didn’t want to risk the dose proving too much for a child to wake from. She needed the little ones out of her clown wig for a minute, and there was only one way Brienne could think of to make that happen, barring challenging them all to a karate match. 

She bent down till her face was level with Robin’s and all the children were in her line of sight. She pitched her voice low: “You wanna see something funny?” she growled. 

The children’s noise was extinguished under the force of Brienne’s scowl, evident even under the aggressively cheerful makeup. Robin Arryn let go of her leg, his mouth hanging open. The only sounds in the house were the bleeping fire alarm in the kitchen and the Baelishes’ whispered argument. Petyr Baelish did not sound happy, and Lysa was tearful. 

“Whoa,” Podrick breathed in Brienne’s ear.

“Magic,” Jaime said, a touch smug. Like he’d been the one to shut the children up. “That’s my Brienne.”

As though they’d heard him, the children started to shift around on the floor, waking from the spell of Brienne’s scowl. One little girl began to sniffle. In another moment, she’d be bawling, and Brienne still hadn’t had a good look at the mantelpiece. 

Skirting Robin Arryn where he stood in slack-jawed shock, Brienne fell to her knees before the crying girl, smiled as sweetly as she could, and lifted her hand to her red clown’s nose. She squeezed it. It tooted, loud as an air-raid siren in the large den. 

The children’s eyes grew round as saucers.

“Do that again,” Jaime breathed in the same rapt voice he sometimes used when Brienne surprised him (and herself) in their bedroom. 

Brienne tooted her nose again. The children burst into titters, which quickly grew to a storm of hysterical merriment. While Jaime laughed in her ear and she wished she were facing off against three armed bodyguards rather than a roomful of volatile children, Brienne took off the red nose and offered it to the girl, who was still red-cheeked and snotty yet laughing loudest of all.

As soon as the little girl took the red nose and started squeezing it, a rapid-fire succession of shrill blasts, arguments erupted over who would get to toot the nose next. Robin Arryn staked his claim with the greatest lung power 

“It’s my house and my birthday!” he raged, the only one in tears now. 

The other children ignored or laughed at him. The little girl with the nose pushed another child trying to take the red shiny away from her, and the knot of children turned into a scuffling throng.

Estimating that she had fewer than thirty seconds before an adult came to investigate and Moffo the Clown got turfed out as a disgrace to the clowning profession, Brienne stood up and strode to the fireplace. 

Framed photographs, including one of Lysa Arryn marrying Baelish in a snow-white dress, souvenirs from the Riverlands and the Vale, some trophies: little Robin’s third place at the spelling bee, Petyr Baelish’s Man of the Year award from the King’s Landing Chamber of Commerce…

Brienne snatched up the Man of the Year metal cup with its marble base. The base did not sound like marble when she tapped it. Locating the spring mechanism took several agonizingly long moments, while the battle for the red nose raged behind her, and Jaime and Podrick lobbed unhelpful suggestions in her ear. 

Finally the bottom of the fake marble base popped open. Brienne shook out a small vacuum-packed plastic baggie with a sliver of white lace inside. For once, Jaime offered no sarcastic comment. 

Brienne wondered, not for the first time, at Mrs. Stark’s insistence that the underwear stolen from her laundry the last time her sister and brother-in-law had visited be recovered with all haste and some risk. Then Brienne remembered Catelyn Stark’s older daughter, her mother’s spitting image and just the kind of girl to favor white lace on her private garments. Grimacing, Brienne pocketed the vacuum pack. 

“If the way to the front door is not clear, Brienne,” Jaime was saying urgently, “Podrick will deactivate their security perimeter in the back garden. Now…”

“You!” 

A male voice, not Jaime’s, and not in Brienne’s ear. In the room with her and the children, who quieted down, sensing an adult argument brewing. 

Turning her back on the mantelpiece, Brienne reflected that it was just her luck Petyr Baelish would grow irritated enough to come investigate the noise in the den himself instead of sending his wife to do it.

As it happened, Baelish had Lysa and a tall, burly blond man with ‘security’ written on his low forehead with him. 

“Balloons!” Jaime and Podrick chorused.

Brienne did not even hesitate, though her heart stuttered a little at the thought of the children. She could only hope the gas would affect the adults more than the children as it rose, and dissipate in the large room before it could cause the little ones any permanent damage. With a ragged fingernail, she punctured three balloons. 

Nothing happened. She stared at Baelish and his two companions, and they stared back. 

“Bugger and blast,” Jaime raged in Brienne’s ear. “Pod, what in seven hells did you put in those balloons?”

“Th… the room is big, Mr. L… Lannister,” the lad stuttered.

Brienne’s mind was still buzzing when Baelish solved the mystery by speaking. 

_“What are you waiting for, Hardyng? Shoot her.”_

_“No, Petyr, the children!”_ Mrs. Baelish exclaimed, clutching at her husband’s sleeve.

Brienne nearly whimpered, while in her ear Jaime was apparently taking a left-handed swing at Podrick, screaming about helium in a voice pitched almost as high as the Baelishes’. 

“The… the cannisters,” Podrick pleaded, sounding on the verge of tears. “The store room is a mess. I’m sorry…”

Mrs. Baelish abandoned trying to reason with her husband and clutched his bodyguard’s arm, preventing him from taking aim at Brienne, apparently oblivious of the danger the wavering handgun posed to the children, who cowered in a knot on the floor. Little Robin was weeping piteously and calling to his mama, while his mother and stepfather screeched at each other like a pair of oversized mice. 

Brienne would have spared some pity for the children, but she knew she’d feel sorrier for herself if Hardyng shook off his employer’s wife and took aim. In a trice, she was at the sliding glass doors, then she was out on the vast expanse of manicured lawn, picking up as much speed as her clown shoes allowed.

Behind her, she heard Baelish over the sounds of his wife and the children going into hysterics in unison, his voice eerily calm and high: _“Hardyng, release the hounds.”_

_“Just Bear or all of them, sir?”_

Brienne put on a fresh burst of speed, lifting her knees high so as not to trip over the too-long shoes, feeling like a wading bird. Within seconds, a thunderstorm of barks erupted behind and to the left of her, but in those few seconds she’d heard Jaime order Podrick to drive their van right up to the garden wall, where a poplar grew on the other side. 

Brienne adjusted her course slightly so she was heading straight for the poplar, Bear and the other hellhounds giving chase. Her breath was a factory whistle in her ears.

The garden wall was over eight feet tall and made of red brick, more decoration than true protection. Brienne scrambled up it, grazing her palms, the clown shoes helping her traction even as they reduced her agility. Throwing her leg over the top of the wall, relieved to find neither crushed glass nor spikes on top since Baelish put all his faith in electronic security, Brienne spotted a slavering mastiff bound up, jaws snapping after the leg still dangling on its side of the wall. 

Brienne yelped shrilly and fell rather than climbed off the wall, poplar-side. 

Jaime was there to cushion her fall. He steadied her on her trembling feet, eyeing the barking wall balefully. 

“Are you all right?” he demanded. “Are you injured?”

Brienne nodded, then shook her head, feeling flushed and breathless, blaming the shoes. A sprint did not usually leave her so winded. Her wig fell half over her eyes as Jaime helped her into the back of the van. 

Brienne rocked in her seat as Podrick peeled away from the Baelishes’ garden wall, tires chewing the country road as they headed for the highway. Jaime rocked against her, sitting very close, as he often did after an extraction.

Brienne reached into her pocket, brought out the transparent baggie full of white lace. She showed it to Jaime. 

“Ah,” he drawled, imitating their employer’s (dignified according to Brienne, prissy according to Jaime) tone. “You got ‘the garment.’ Next time Catelyn Stark might consider keeping her dirty laundry where Baelish can’t get to it.”

Brienne decided to wait until she no longer sounded like a large rodent to share her hunch about the real owner of the underwear with Jaime. She shoved the baggie back into her pocket with a trembling hand.

“Are you certain you’re all right?” Jaime asked again, low and urgent. “Did that dog…”

Brienne shook her head, held up her palms so he could see a few grazes were the worst she’d sustained.

Jaime caught her right hand in his left and kissed it. Brienne glanced over at Podrick, but the lad was concentrating on driving. 

“You look awful,” Jaime whispered, right in Brienne’s ear, the one not filled by the earpiece. “Your makeup is all smudged, and your hair is askew.”

Brienne suddenly felt like crying. Or hitting Jaime for teasing her about wearing this costume, putting herself through this humiliation. Brienne had chosen this life, but sometimes the absurdity weighed heavier than the danger. She kept squeezing her lips, holding back a torrent of what she knew would be such high-pitched invective, her anger would only make Jaime laugh and her even angrier. 

Jaime must have noticed how her hand shook in his, how she couldn’t stop patting the pocket with the baggie or squeezing her lips. He leaned in slowly, lest he risked an adrenaline-fueled defensive blow, and pressed his lips to her cheek. He did not move away until a few moments passed and the freeway lights appeared, large and bright in their windshield. 

“Nearly home and dry,” Jaime murmured, pulling a face at the taste of stage makeup. Brienne nodded, squeezing his hand. 

Jaime added, more loudly: “Podrick, you’ll be doing pushups and running laps for a month as well as putting the store room to order for this snafu. And you can whistle for the next time you’ll go out into the field. Consider yourself our new office boy until I decide otherwise.”

“Yes, Mr. Lannister,” Podrick said softly, hunching over the steering wheel. 

Brienne made a mental note to speak to the lad tomorrow, when her voice didn’t sound ridiculous. Podrick had made a grave error and put Brienne in danger, yes, but he was still an asset to the company. Brienne did not want him losing heart. 

Jaime pitched his voice low again, speaking in Brienne’s ear. “We’ll get you out of those clothes, wash off that godsawful-tasting makeup, and take you home. You’re taking the day off tomorrow, so you are welcome to get on your treadmill or clean the oven or work through our paperwork backlog or whatever you feel like doing till you’re relaxed enough for a good, long sleep. Although,” he added silkily and not very quietly, “I sincerely hope you’ll opt to ride me till I’m whittled down to a dry stick and barely able to come in to work, Moffo.”

Brenne inhaled, hoping the effects of the helium had dissipated.

_“JAIME, BE QUIET!”_


End file.
